


You're Allowed to Cry Over the Apocalypse

by EdgarAllenPoet



Series: Lucretia's Volumes [My Balance Fics] [17]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Crying, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, IPRE, Stolen Century, first cycle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-10
Updated: 2019-09-10
Packaged: 2020-10-13 19:27:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20587811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EdgarAllenPoet/pseuds/EdgarAllenPoet
Summary: Lup snorted a quiet laugh and nodded.  “Right, right,” she agreed.  “What are you, like, seventy?  Such a grown up.  Still in the midst of adolescence in elf years, kemosabe.”Barry frowned, opened his mouth a few times to speak and closed it again unsure, before settling on mumbling, “I’m thirty-seven….”





	You're Allowed to Cry Over the Apocalypse

**Author's Note:**

> One of those prompt lists is floating around tumblr. Prompt: "Your eyes are red.... were you crying?" Blupjeans
> 
> I'm of the persuasion that Barry is a LITTLE younger than fifty. Listen, man, my parents are in their fifties. I can't imagine either of them falling in love with a beautiful young elf, nor do I WANT to. Leave the old people love stories to Mama and Barclay, I'm sorry, we've de-aged the man just a bit.

—Year One—

Planets without civilization got so damn dark at night.

Okay, no. That was no a fair thing to say. That was not a scientific thing to say, and Barry was, if nothing else, a scientist. Chief science officer, to be exact, on a mission from a demolished world, with no ground control, and no plan, and no real purpose at all. 

Exploring the planes. Traveling where no one had gone before. Inviting unimaginable monsters to eat their world. Discovering new worlds.

So far the only world they’d discovered didn’t even have humanoids on it. And okay, Barry didn’t want to sound ungrateful. He was still exploring, he was still “living the dream,” or what had once been the dream, for sure. There was at least language here, and a society, though it didn’t have any electricity.

Gods, Barry missed electricity. He missed the ship, too, he realized. He was getting a little sick of camping.

He was getting a little sick of everything, these days.

He and the twins had been out here for a while now, with a little camp they’d set up and a whole community of Mongeese ready to talk to them. The Mongeese had long since retired for the night, as had the twins, leaving Barry to poke idly at the fire and keep his eyes firmly away from the shadows that moved between the trees.

He’d been afraid of the dark when he was little, for longer than was necessarily acceptable. But he was a grown man now, an astronaut, a scientist, and he wasn’t about to be scared of the dark like he was twelve or something.

His mother had taught him light early on, one of his first cantrips, and he’d crept through the shadows following a shaky beacon on the end of a trembling wand. It had taken all his energy and attention, and if anything startled him, it would quickly go out and leave him stranded. 

But she was ready to hold his hand and wipe away his tears, when need be. She’d done hard work, raising him all by herself. She’d had high standards and unshakable faith in him. She’d been so proud when she heard about the mission, even though Barry was full grown and far too old for her to go hanging anything on the ice box. She told everyone she knew. She’d talked of throwing a party when the two months was up.

Barry blew out a breath and dug his wand from his robes, looking for any kind of distraction he could muster. With the flick of his wrist his wand lit, bright white light illuminating the tip and competing with the light of the fire. He traced a circle, let his eyes lag, and very purposefully did not look out into the forest surrounding them.

“What are you doing?”

Barry flinched out of his skin and nearly dropped his wand into the fire. The light went out, and the owner of the stage whisper voice went from peering over his shoulder to climbing over the log and sitting next to him. Barry shoved his wand back into his robes and looked them over, saw the haircut and made the differentiation. Lup. The twins could be hard to tell apart if you weren’t paying attention. Both tan, blonde, and stunning. Still remarkably different from each other. Barry was glad it was Lup who decided to join him— even though he hadn’t even heard her get up, how had she done that??— Taako was kind of a dick.

“Hey, your eyes are red….” She leaned in close to him— too close— and frowned. “Were you crying?”

She reached out for him, and he flinched back, scooted to put more space between them, and scrubbed under his eyes with the heel of his hand.

“No,” he said.

She raised an eyebrow and scooted close again, closing the space.

“You can if you want, babe, I don’t judge.”

“I’m not.”

“It’s seriously a-okay—“

“I’m a grown man!”

Lup snorted a quiet laugh and nodded. “Right, right,” she agreed. “What are you, like, seventy? Such a grown up. Still in the midst of adolescence in elf years, kemosabe.”

Barry frowned, opened his mouth a few times to speak and closed it again unsure, before settling on mumbling, “I’m thirty-seven….” much to Lup’s amusement.

“Ah, yes,” she said. “Three decades of life. So mature.”

Barry reached out for a small branch from the fire, only half-lit. He picked up the cool end and used it to poke at the embers, spread around the embers and prompt the fire to release a few indignant puffs of sparks. “Not everything runs on elf time,” he said.

Lup popped her tongue against her teeth. “Shame,” she said. “It ought to. That would mean less math for me.”

“Don’t you have a doctorate? In, like, experimental conjuration and thermodynamics?”

“We all have doctorates, that ain’t special.”

“Magnus doesn’t have a doctorate.”

“Magnus is an actual baby.”

Barry shrugged. He could concede on that one. “They shouldn’t have let someone that young on this mission, top officer or not. That’s too young to lose your entire family.”

Lup was quiet for a beat after that, studying Barry out of the side of her eye. Barry pressed his lips together, feeling like he talked out of turn or let something slip. He wondered what it was, until Lup spoke again and told him.

She asked, “Is that what’s bothering you, then?” He shrugged silently.

She nodded again and said, “I can’t imagine what you’re all going through. It must be terrible.”

That threw him a bit. He glanced over at her and bumped her with his elbow. “I’m not the only one that lost family,” he said. “You lost people on Tusun too. That can’t be easy.”

Lup nudged him back and grinned, taking the stick from his hand and poking at the fire herself. She caught it on the end, pulled it up to dance in a swirl through the air, like a tiny dragon orbiting the wood. “Brought my family with me. Taako and I didn’t have anyone else. When the world went, well, that’s just as well in our eyes. Anyone we had left could go to hell.”

Barry didn’t know what to say to that. He settled for, “Family can be…. rough,” and Lup actually laughed. She shifted on the log, tossed the branch back into the fire, and turned to face him. She said, “Tell me about yours, then.”

“Mine?”

“Family, whoever. Gotta brother? Or like, a mom? Everyone has a mom, right?”

Barry had had one hell of a mom, once upon a time. He swallowed down the feelings that welled at that thought and said, in the animal language they’d been practicing. “If I talk about my mom, I really will cry.”

Lup grinned at him and tossed her arm around his shoulders, sharing body heat and leaning her weight into him. She responded in that same language, saying, “You can cry, I won’t tell.”

— Several Cycles Later —

The room was dark, pitch black. Up hadn’t left it in days. Not since Magnus came back from their scouting mission alone and painted in blood, tears streaming down his face as he explained that he just hadn’t been fast enough to save him.

Lup had walked out of the room and into her quarters, where she’d been for nearly a week. 

Barry lit the tip of his wand as he pushed the door open, his knock going unanswered, but enough was enough. He expected to find Lup in bed, a bundle of blankets and a nest of hair. Instead he found her sitting at her desk, cross-legged on her chair and staring off into the distance. She startled him at first, sitting absolutely motionless and vacant. 

“Lup…?” he called, then groped around the wall until his hand landed on the light switch. He smacked it, and the light blinked on. Up blinked her eyes against the harsh change and turned to face him. Her usually so soothing expression was pinched with distraught. Her hair was tied back, tight, but the pony tail was uneven. Her nose was red, eyes puffy. 

He crept a bit closer and crouched on the ground next to her. Her eyes followed him the whole way. “Your eyes are red,” he noticed. “How long have you been crying?”

She sniffed once and scrubbed under her nose with her sleeve. She was wearing an IPRE sweater. The breast emblem read “School of Transmutation,” and Barry had to wonder if she planned on washing the snot off of it before the start of the next cycle. Taako would throw a fit if he found it, probably. 

“Losing people isn’t easy,” he said. “But if you hang in there, you’ll get him back again.” 

She nodded and patted his shoulder, tears welling in her eyes again. A few small movements, and she was sliding out of her chair and onto the floor next to him. He held his breath as she leaned forward and dropped her forehead onto his shoulder, and once he remembered how to un-freeze his muscles, he reached out hesitantly and patted her back. She sighed, collapsing further into him, and he relented and wrapped his arm around her.

“Tell me about your mother again?” she asked, and he chuckled.

“Ah geez….”

“I don’t want to be the only dork crying here, Barold.”

“Alright, alright. What do you want to know?”


End file.
